AMD will ship processors based on the next generation of its AMD64 architecture in two years' time after sampling them late 2007, company CEO Hector Ruiz has revealed.

In an interview conducted by BusinessWeek earlier this month, Ruiz said: "We're going to introduce a really new architecture that will work well with our partners for the best performance. We're going to start sampling it at the end of 2007 and roll it out in 2008."

Earlier this month, AMD said it will ship new cores for its server, desktop and mobile lines in 2007, but these are expected to be the 65nm die-shrinks of its current and soon-to-be-launched DDR 2-supporting Sempron, Athlon and Opteron product lines.

The next-generation architecture Opterons - the ones Ruiz is talking about - are believed to be codenamed 'Zamora' and 'Cadiz', for the 2xxx/8xxx and 1xxx series, respectively. They will be quad-core CPUs that support HyperTransport 3 and FB-DIMM memory, and gain some server-friendly L3 cache. The Athlon equivalent, 'Greyhound', has been said to support HyperTransport 3 and DDR 3. ®